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Viruses may aid fight against bacterial infections

May 26, 2000

LOS ANGELES (Reuters Health) - Bacteriophages--viruses that only infect

bacteria--hold promise as an alternative to traditional antibiotics,

according to a number of presentations here last week at the annual meeting

of the American Society for Microbiology.

Bacteriophage therapy has a number of advantages over traditional antibiotic

therapy, presenter E. Cerveny of the University of Florida,

Gainesville, told Reuters Health.

For example, traditional antibiotics have to constantly be readministered

because the levels decrease, she said. On the other hand, " phage are only

present when the bacteria (are) there, " she said. " They increase as the

bacteria are growing, they keep growing with them, and then when the

bacteria are gone, the phage are gone also. "

Also, resistance might be less of a problem than with traditional

antibiotics, because even if bacteria become resistant, there are so many

phages in nature and they evolve with the bacteria, so it should be easy to

find other phages that can be used against them, she added.

In her group's experiments, the team isolated bacteriophages from seawater

that could infect Vibrio vulnificus, a " flesh-eating " bacteria that

contaminates oysters. Eating the oysters causes rapid infection and is often

fatal, particularly in people genetically predisposed to high iron levels.

Cerveny and colleagues treated mice with iron dextran to mimic iron overload

and infected them with V. vulnificus. Some mice were also treated with a

single dose of the bacteriophage. Most untreated animals became sick and

died within 24 hours, but mice receiving the phage recovered.

The investigators also found a bacteriophage that could only infect bacteria

under saltwater conditions and not the physiological conditions of a mouse.

As expected, that bacteriophage was not effective in preventing infection.

The idea right now is to treat oysters with the phage before they get to the

consumer, although treating people with phage would be especially useful in

a disease like this where their condition deteriorates so rapidly that

antibiotics would not have time to work, Ceverny said.

Although the research is still in the preliminary stages, she is optimistic

about its prospects. " I'd rather be treated with phage than with

antibiotics, but that's just a personal feeling, " she said. " It has a long

way to go before it's used in antibiotic therapy. "

Although bacteriophage therapy is a new idea in the US, it was used

routinely in Eastern Europe long before the age of modern antibiotics, Dr.

E. Kutter of Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, told

Reuters Health. She is involved in the Phage Biotics Foundation, which

promotes research on therapeutic uses of bacteriophages.

A number of Western companies are exploring phage-based therapies, she said,

the oldest being Rockville, land-based Exponential Biotherapies, which

is getting ready to do clinical trials of phage therapy on

vancomycin-resistant enterococcus. One phage-based product is Phage Bioderm,

an artificial skin containing phages that was developed by scientists in

Georgia in the former Soviet Union, and is now being developed with the

Baltimore, land-based Intralytix